Teachers “in the making”: Building accounts of teaching

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Teaching and Teacher Education 23 (2007) 612–623 www.elsevier.com/locate/tate

Teachers ‘‘in the making’’: Building accounts of teaching Eli Ottesen Department of Teacher Education and School Development, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1099 Blindern, 0316 Oslo, Norway

Abstract In this paper, mentoring practices during internship in teacher education are identified as boundary activities between schools and universities. By using the notions of common places and accounting practices, the emerging discourses of student teachers and mentors in a Norwegian school are explored to expand our understanding of how conceptual, practical and contextual resources are used to construct justified accounts of experiences. The results of this study indicate that during internship the student teachers learn ways of seeing, representing and talking about their experiences that are deemed relevant within the school’s practice, using and transforming resources accordingly. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Teacher education; Internship; Socio-cultural theory

1. Introduction It is argued that the knowledge base for teaching and teacher education is dubious and contested (Calderhead & Shorrock, 1997; Edwards, Gilroy, & Hartley, 2002; Hargreaves, 1993; Mathisen, 2000; McNamara, 1993; Sundli, 2001). Research on teaching and teacher education has produced substantial bodies of knowledge, based on inquiry into a multiplicity of issues, and employing a wide range of research approaches. The content and approaches to learning and teaching show considerable variation across teacher education programmes, both within and between nations. However, there is a noticeable similarity in structure. Though the emphasis and placement of the various elements differ (Furlong, Barton, Miles, Whiting, & Whitty, 2000; Sundli, 2003), teacher education is usually made up of three Tel.: +47 22854280.

E-mail address: [email protected].

parts: academic coursework providing subject-matter knowledge, professional coursework focusing on pedagogical issues, and field experience during internship periods (Wang & Odell, 2002). The various learning processes may be examined separately, but to understand their complexity, confluence, and meaning for student teachers’ development, it seems vital to explore how different types of knowing interact when students engage in activities in teacher education. Calderhead and Shorrock (1997, p. 195) identify ‘‘a tension between the need for teachers to understand teaching and the need to be able to perform teaching’’, and argue that the theory/practice dichotomy may be oversimplified in the educational debate. By constructing a ‘‘gap’’ between the two, theory and practice are positioned as separate domains, and though the relation between them remains unclear, an aim in teacher education seems to be to close the gap by bridging, linking or integrating theory and practice through designs for

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applying theory in practice, or by using theory to guide practice (Smagorinsky, Cook, & Johnson, 2003). Teaching is a practical activity, but to learn the professional practice of teaching, it may be necessary to ‘‘move learning to teach from the level of ritual to that of principled knowledge’’ (Russell, 1993, p. 213), both in university courses and during internship. In order to advance research in teacher education, it seems vital to open the ‘‘black boxes’’ of its constituent practices to explore the learning processes within and between them. Student teachers are concurrent participants in several practices: They are students in university courses, student teachers in the practice school, and often teachers in classrooms. Each practice can be seen as a separate activity system (Edwards et al., 2002; Ludvigsen & Flo, 2002) regulated by specific purposes, routines, conventions, rules, divisions of labour, and material and conceptual tools, constituting the social and cultural foundation for individual and collective understanding and action. In travelling across multiple practices, one might expect tensions between them to emerge (cf. Edwards et al., 2002). This paper builds on an in-depth study of the discourses between four student teachers and their two mentors during internship. The purpose is to explore the dynamics of the interaction between the student teachers and mentors, avoiding the theory/ practice divide by focusing on how potential tensions are discursively managed. The main research questions are: (1) How is intersubjectivity negotiated between student teachers and mentors during internship? (2) What resources are at play in students’ and mentors’ accounting practices? (3) How are inherent tensions discursively managed in interaction? 2. Adopting a socio-cultural approach In the socio-cultural approach adopted for this paper, practices are conceived as recurring cultural activities in which knowledge is continuously being negotiated, developed and transformed as an integral aspect of those activities. In their talk, student teachers and mentors make use of historically developed cultural resources to describe, explain and categorise their practical experiences (cf. Ma¨kitalo & Sa¨ljo¨, 2002), resources that include common sense understanding, practical wisdom,

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and scientific explanations. In using such resources, they constitute events in particular ways. While an activity is assumed to impelled or directed by a motive (Leont’ev, 1978) in the boundary activity constituted by student teachers’ and mentors’ discussions during internship, several motives are at work: i.e. student teachers’ learning and student teachers’ teaching (cf. Kaptelinin, 2005). The tension between the two is discursively balanced or resolved in the participants’ accounting practices; how it is resolved is open to empirical investigation. Mentoring in teacher education has learning as its intended outcome. Student teachers’ and mentors’ discourses constitute and are products of the activity. In this sense, knowledge production can be seen as the discursive achievements of justified accounts within the institution (cf. Ma¨kitalo & Sa¨ljo¨, 2002). The principal issues in this paper concern how such accounts are interactively developed and warranted in discursive activity, and how forms of knowing constitute resources in the interaction. Examples of such resources could be the skills and understanding appropriated through learning activities at the university, the practical theories of practicing teachers, experiential knowing from being a student in school, etc. As resources in discursive activity, different forms of knowing are not in themselves inherently more or less advanced, accurate or truthful; rather, the issue is if and how they are used and accepted in the production of legitimate accounts during internship (Van Oers, 1998). As an integrated endeavour consisting of a range of campus based courses and periods of internship, teacher education requires re-contextualising across activities. Concepts and theories that are meaningful for students’ understanding of teaching in coursework at the university are transformed, modified or reinforced during internship and vice versa. Vygotsky (1986, 1987) theory of the development of concepts supports this argument; he claims that meaning is developed through the interplay between spontaneous concepts developed in ‘‘face-to-face meeting with a concrete situation’’ (Vygotsky, 1986, pp. 194–195) and scientific concepts developed through ‘‘acts of thought which are associated with free movement in the concept system, with the generalisation of previously developed generalisations, and with a more conscious and voluntary mode of operating on these existing concepts’’ (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 181). Thus, in their trajectories across different activities,

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students’ understanding of teaching develops ‘‘simultaneously from two directions: from the direction of the general and the particular’’ (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 163). Teacher education, on campus as well as during internships, could be expected to provide learning opportunities that pay special attention to the relationship between abstract knowledge and experience in the world. This is by no means a simple enterprise, as the various activity systems student teachers participate in enable and constrain diverse modes of re-contextualising. The internship constitutes a site in which ‘‘the twisting paths’’ (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 156) of spontaneous and scientific concepts might intersect. Data from student teachers’ and mentors’ discourses during internship could yield salient insight into the knowledge building of student teachers. 3. The study The data analysed in this paper were collected during the 12-week internship of four student teachers in a medium-sized upper secondary school. The mentors were regular teachers, selected by their principal to act as mentors for the students. The students, two women and two men, were enrolled in a reform project, the Programme for Teacher Education, Technology and Change at the University of Oslo,1 which, among other things, intended to strengthen the connection between the on-campus and the school based parts of the programme. The primary data were gathered from audiotapes of discussions between mentors and students and between students in peer collaboration, amounting to nearly 50 h of talk. Field notes from the lessons conducted by the students and the students’ participation in various activities in the school were used as background information to situate the discussions. A central methodological challenge has been to study learning ‘‘in the making’’ (Barab, Hay, & Ymagata-Lynch, 2001; Vygotsky, 1986). The discussion sessions between students and between students and mentors are chosen as primary data because they are assumed to constitute an important arena in which interacting individuals make use of a variety of resources to make sense of their 1

The PLUTO programme is innovative in several other aspects as well. See for instance http://www.ils.uio.no/studier/PPU/pluto/, Hauge (2004), Ludvigsen and Flo (2002), and Flo and Ludvigsen (2002).

experiences. The methodological approach chosen in the study is interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), which builds on ethnomethodology in the sense that it focuses on the methods that people use to develop a reasonable account of what is happening in social interaction and to provide a structure for the interaction itself (cf. Ma¨kitalo & Sa¨ljo¨, 2002). Thus, learning is conceived of as a dynamic process in which people make use of each other and contextual resources. In researching this process, it is necessary to describe the mechanisms used by participants to select among available resources to accomplish their work. In the analysis, the scientific software Atlas.ti has been used as a workbench to transcribe the audiotapes and code the raw data according to topics, initiation and participation, resources employed, and activities (cf. Barab et al., 2001). When categories are tracked across instances in the data, interactions involving the joint construction of common places and acceptable accounts of experiences emerge as potent mechanisms in the collaborative learning processes. This paper addresses the micro-processes of institutional talk. In socio-cultural studies, such processes are seen as situated; that is, the unit of analysis consists of individuals engaged in social activity mediated by social and cultural resources connecting the particular and the conventional (Ma¨kitalo & Sa¨ljo¨, 2002). To study mechanisms for interactional management calls for in-depth investigations over time; thus, the richness of audio taped material was prioritised over the number of student teachers in the sample. The excerpts cited in this paper are exemplars, representing a substantial number of instances from the total body of data. The selected exemplars build on transcripts from the first four weeks of internship midway into the first semester, and the issue at hand is educational planning. 4. Tools for re-contextualising: common places and accounting practices In research on initial teacher training, discussion between student teachers and mentors have been reported to focus on the student teachers’ performance as deliverers of curriculum (Edwards & Protheroe, 2003), to encourage adaptations to the routines of traditional schools (Franke & Dahlgren, 1996; Søndena˚ & Sundli, 2004) or to provide emotional or technical support for survival (Wang & Odell, 2002). Whatever mentoring can be seen to

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accomplish, it is essentially a communicative project, situated in particular social practices. The interactions of student teachers and mentors constitute and are constituted within practices that are saturated with traditions of argumentation and acting (cf. Ma¨kitalo & Sa¨ljo¨, 2002; Shotter, 1993; Wertsch, 1991). In discourses, interacting individuals draw upon their knowledge of meanings that have already been formulated (i.e. the body of scientific or common-sense knowledge appropriate to the activity). What is important is not whether such knowledge may be labelled ‘‘scientific’’ or ‘‘spontaneous’’ (Vygotsky, 1986), but rather how their arguments contribute to the discursive formation of justified accounts. The meanings developed in any particular instance are worked out responsively between the discourse participants and the situation (Shotter, 1993). In order to understand and develop internship in teacher education, research needs to address the doing of discourses (cf. Ma¨kitalo & Sa¨ljo¨, 2002), that is, investigate how the participants, through their talk, seek to establish a common ground for interpretation, understanding, or action (Linell, 1998). For this study, a substantial amount of interactional data were collected and analysed in order to shed light on how such communicative projects unfold during internship in teacher education (see above). A central issue is how knowing and being a student on campus is transformed to knowing and being a student teacher in schools. In what follows, I will focus on the interconnected processes through which ‘‘being’’ is re-contextualised: promoting intersubjectivity through development of common places and production of warranted accounts. Initially, I will briefly discuss these two notions. In the subsequent sections, I will turn to a few excerpts from my material to substantiate my argument through analysis and discussion. Managing intersubjectivity is a constituent of all discursive action (Rommetveit, 1992). Duranti and Goodwin (1992) assert that common understanding of individual utterances presuppose understanding of cultural setting and speech situation. An objective context for an individual utterance is nonexistent; part of the work of discourse is to collectively construct contexts, making the utterance intelligible and meaningful to interlocutors. Thus, contextual resources are evoked in the discourse itself, creating the double dialogicity of discourse (Linell, 1998) in which the local and global historicity of the discourse links the constructed

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situation and the culture. One aspect of ‘‘finding out what we are accomplishing together’’ concerns the construction of common knowledge, as a foundation for moving on in the discussion in a rational manner. Of course, the establishment of intersubjectivity can never be complete (Rommetveit, 1992), and within nearly every encounter the participants are also doing the work of developing common knowledge for the current practical case. While the concept of intersubjectivity is a generic term related to all human intercourse, I find that the notion common places (Middleton, 1998; Shotter, 1984, 1993) serves better to elucidate the persistent formation and reformation of common frames for discussing aspects of teaching experiences in this study. Shotter (1993, p. 54) sees common places as ‘‘shared moments in a flow of social activity which afford common reference (y)’’. Middleton (1998) uses the term to refer to the linguistic activity of representing or re-representing past experiences, building a middle ground in which the object of the discourse can be talked about by all parties as more or less the same thing, a crucial task in almost every encounter. The fluctuating nature of common places calls for frequent repairs (Linell, 1998) in discourse, both regarding construction of the topic to be attended to, negotiation about how it should be talked about, and what specifically needs to be elaborated in the case. Embedded in joint construction of common places are the relative rights of the participants to have their voices heard, reflecting the asymmetry between participants (Linell & Luckmann, 1991). In researching student teachers’ and mentors’ discourses during internship, how common places are established, developed and attended to becomes an urgent issue. The greater part of the student teachers’ actions are implicitly acknowledged as understandable and justifiable within the practice, in the sense that they are not talked about in mentoring discourses. However, when actions or ideas for some reason are deemed troublesome, they need to be accounted for. Through such accounting practices, what is dubious may be justified (or acquitted), when interlocutors ‘‘methodically, by the use of established ‘‘but not as yet accounted for’’ accounting practices embedded in their everyday activities, actively make themselves accountable to one another’’ (Shotter, 1984, p. 54).2 Experience is 2

This use of the concept of accountability may differ from the discourse of the day in which accountability is frequently

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re-contextualised in our accounts of it, contingent upon the demand placed on us as members of a community. In discussions, descriptions, explanations and narratives, we orient ourselves to explicit or implicit rules and norms in order to be considered accountable (Shotter, 1984). Thus, discussions about teaching activities can be seen as student teachers’ and mentors’ bids for accountability as they collectively construct accounts of compliance, resistance or negotiation, building on what they perceive to be norms for teaching or teacher education. Below I will analyse a few transcribed segments of discourse, using the key analytic terms common places and accounting practice to elucidate ways in which justifiable accounts are discursively produced in the situated interactions between student teachers and mentors. 5. Making sense of practice During internship, the tasks of the student teachers in this study are to collectively plan, carry out and evaluate teaching. In the mentoring discourses, ‘‘teaching’’ is accounted for as experienced or future activities. The analysis reveals that the participants make use of a variety of cultural resources to build their accounts, as i.e. theoretical and practical knowledge, and conventions and rituals of the specific practice. Through their enactment of such resources, the student teachers are positioned as students, teachers, learners, etc. (cf. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) in disparate discourses. Their positions enable and constrain their accounts and collective construction of common places. In their first 4-week internship period, the student teachers work with a lesson plan,3 which tends to (footnote continued) associated with external evaluation practices as systems for identification of deviance or excellence in relation to standards of quality, or to individuals’ sense of the moral or practical justification for their actions (Good, 1996; Møller, 2004; O’Day, 2002; Sinclair, 1995; Sockett, 1993). In this paper, it is argued that accountability is generated in discourse as a joint venture. 3 The outline of this plan is developed at the university. The student teachers are expected to state goals for student learning, account for the content of the lesson (themes, tasks, educational resources), the methods (what they as teachers intend to do, what the students are expected to do, and the amount of time allocated to each task), and the evaluation (what the student teachers would focus on in evaluating the students’ work, and how he or she would give feedback).

structure their practical work as well as their discussions. In the following excerpt, two students are discussing the plan they are outlining for a lesson in foreign language education. They have decided that they would like the students to individually read a text in their textbooks, look up the words they do not understand in a dictionary, talk about the text in pairs, and finally, participate in a class discussion. They then start on the task of filling in the lesson plan. Stein (the one in charge of the actual teaching) attends to the writing. Excerpt one4 Stein (1):

What isy I need to put down the goal.5 What does it say, Siri? Siri (2): Let’s see mm This fits [reads from the national curriculum] Have knowledge about history, geography, society, literature, art, and other cultural traditions within the language area Stein (3): Great, let me see yI’ll write that down Siri (4): Don’t you think you should be more specific? Stein (5): No, this is good. That’s what I want them to learn Siri (6): Yes, on a general level, but not all of them. The part in the book [the students’ text book] is more about society Stein (7): Oh. Yes, then I’ll just put that [The student teachers continue to successively fill in the categories in the lesson plan. A few minutes later the following exchange takes place as they reach the category ‘‘evaluation’’.] Stein (8):

Siri (9):

Stein (10):

4

How can you know what they learnyI guess listening? When they talky Yes, that would give a good impression. You could hear if they knew the facts from the book. But the students might talky I know, talk about different things. Have to keep them focussed somehow. A test wouldybut we

The excerpts are translated by the author from the Norwegian transcripts. 5 The word ‘‘ma˚l’’ in Norwegian carries multiple connotations. The same term is used for long-term goals, objectives, targets and purpose, making it a messy, but flexible term, strongly in need of semantic negotiation.

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can’t make tests on every little lesson. So I guess just settle for listening. In this dialogue, the student teachers are positioned as students, engaged in a task that is externally defined (that of completing the lesson plan). The lesson was in fact quickly planned before they turned to the lesson plan document; however, as students they must account for their plan in the terms and categories of the prescribed document. Their common sense construction of ‘‘what to do’’ needs to be credibly fitted into the empty slots of the form. A common place from which to proceed in their work is established: the categories of the planning document are constituted as givens, which direct subsequent activity. Their work with the first category in the lesson plan, stating a goal for the lesson, demonstrates how filling in the form ‘‘correctly’’ is the common place from which they proceed in their discussion. By turning to the national curriculum’s competency goals in search of a proper goal, their accounts are linked to their perceived mandate as teachers. Siri’s concern (4) is about how much of the curriculum’s text is appropriate to include. The learning material is not analysed to consider possible learning goals embedded in the text; only on a general level is it considered to be more about ‘‘society’’ than, for instance, history or art. In (8)–(10) the student teachers are discussing how they might evaluate the lesson. They want to assess whether the students know ‘‘the facts from the book’’, a much narrower goal than the one they have constructed previously; however, they do not seem to make a connection between the two elements of the plan. As far as evaluation goes, being accountable amounts to making sure they know what the students learn, and that the students learn what is in the textbook. While from an observer’s point of view this may appear as a break in the logic, from the common place of completing the task of filling out a form it is sensible. Despite the fact that the student teachers’ concerns do not seem to be theoretical in nature, they noticeably make use of educational theory as cultural resources to support their positions: using the didactical categories of the lesson plan, drawing on curriculum theory to define goals, and raising the possibility of relying on tests to confirm students’ learning. The next excerpt is from a session with the mentor in the afternoon of the same day, but before the

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actual teaching takes place. The topic for this part of the discussion is the students’ suggestions for the lesson plan. They have been talking about the practical arrangements for the lesson in which Stein is responsible for teaching one part, and then they turn to the lesson plan, which has been photocopied for everybody. Tom is the mentor; the other three participants are student teachers. Excerpt two Tom (11): Stein (12): Tom (13):

Stein (14):

Tom (15): Siri (16):

Tom (17):

Sindre (18):

Siri (19): Sindre (20): Tom (21): Stein (22):

Tom (23):

You have stated as a goal yis it It is from the National Curriculum Yes, that’s fine. How would you say this helps you plan the lesson? I mean, does it give you any ideas about what to do, eh to know what the students learn? Yes and no. You can’t know in advance, can you? I mean, they read the stuff and do the talkingyso in the end, they must learn about the society, or some of it What do you think Siri? We discussed it this morning. And I think maybey more specific as to what this text is about. The city life Well, what is useful, for you as teachers, when you plan a lesson? Is it about the overall goal for the whole subject, or the target for this particular lesson? Well, I do not know about the language part [Sindre is a member of this group of students, but is a science student], but goals are of different kinds. We shouldyI think the general goals are sort of a background, when we set the target for one particular lesson Or for part of the lesson Yes Do you agree, Stein? Yes, sort of. But it’s difficult to be more precise. I mean—have knowledge about city life—how helpful is that? You need to make sure that there is a connection between all the parts of the plan. They are relational. To know what to evaluate, you need to know the purpose, the content and the methods. What exactly do you

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Siri (24): Stein (25):

Tom (26):

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think the students should learn? And how can the methods you use help them? Let’s see. You want them to read the part in the book, look up words they don’t understand, and then talk about it in pairs. So you have structured the lesson in a certain way. So, what do you want to have them learn, or think they will learn, when this is what you make the students do? There are lots of goals here But the main thing in this lesson is the facts. What’s life like in this city. You can’t take in all the goals, some are for now or more important now. What I think—see, what I want to evaluate, is what they know as facts abouty Do they know and understand what the text says? Let’s look closer at the activities you have planned.

Although the mentor Tom does not state it explicitly, he does not seem to be satisfied with what the student teachers have suggested as a goal for the lesson (13, 17). He conveys his discontent by asking questions, as in the IRF-script as a classic teacher-student exchange (Mercer, 1995; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). However, as Wells (1999) has argued, the triadic dialogue genre must be analysed according to its functions in the activity of which it is a part. Through his questions, the mentor Tom implicitly argues for his account, seeking to establish a common place in which his terms may be accepted as the base from which to proceed (cf. Shotter, 1984). At another level, however, the ‘‘work’’ of the dialogue above is one of positioning: Tom is positioning himself as teacher, adopting the right of teachers to ask questions (to which he may know the answers) and have them answered. The student teachers are positioned correspondingly. In their accounts, they establish responsible and reflective selves as students: they did look to the national curriculum (12); they have discussed this (16); they are concerned about students’ learning (25). The triadic dialogue works on several planes. Questions, answers and following-ups can be inferred to promote reflection, in the sense of serving as tools for re-contextualising. By calling attention to discrete issues through his questions

(11, 13, 17, 21), Tom allows for reshaping of the events so that they may be made sense of in novel ways, and he also builds his case concerning ‘‘what counts’’ in this context: what is helpful (13) or useful (17) for planning delivery, what is conducive to student learning and valuable for assessing students’ learning (23). Stein, who is going to conduct the lesson later, seems to be the one who has most at stake. He maintains accountability through ambiguity; rather than overtly changing his stance as the conversation unfolds, he answers ‘‘yes and no’’ (14) and ‘‘Yes, sort of’’ (22). He does not disagree with the objections from the rest of the group, but still holds on to his position until the end when he reformulates the proposed goal. There is a development in the way Stein reasons: in (12) he justifies his choice with reference to the national curriculum, in (14) he argues with reference to the students’ activities, and in (22) he argues that the proposed change from the wide category ‘‘have knowledge about society’’ to the narrower category ‘‘have knowledge about city life’’ is not helpful. Finally, in (25) he ends up with a much narrower target: What he wants the students to learn and understand are facts about city life as presented in the text. In several respects, the mentor, Tom, seems to control the movement in the discourse. He is in a position to ask questions and challenge the students’ understanding, to follow up (or not) on aspects of the students’ contributions, and to address students individually. However, the movement from turn to turn is interactionally managed; each turn offers opportunities for a variety of subsequent turns. Statements offered may or may not be attended to in the continuing dialogue, as when Sindre, supported by Siri (18–20), raises a principled question about goals as a concept. But rather than exploring the concept, his statement is construed as a proposal about the nature of goals, to which agreement is expected. Similarly, Tom’s turn in (23) is not taken as a prompt for theoretical reflection, but rather as a statement about the nature of things to which the student teachers should orient themselves. This is illustrative of a general tendency in this study: concepts and theory are used as descriptive tools in accounting for practice, rather than tools for expanding the participants’ understanding. At the end of this session, Stein agrees to reformulate the goal in line with his comment in (25). The next excerpt is from a session a few days later. Stein has carried out his plan in the classroom with Siri and Tom as observers.

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Excerpt three Tom (27): Stein (28): Siri (29): Stein (30): Tom (31): Stein (32):

Tom (33): Stein (34):

Tom (35): Stein (36):

Siri (37):

Tom (38):

What do you think, Stein? Did it turn out as you expected? [Laughter] Well, it never seems to. Lots of surprises there! You did get through everything. I think you were very efficient. Yes, point by point as planned. So what were the surprises? Two things. That the students knew so much beforehand. No, that wasn’t really a surprise, I just didn’t thinky And that they talked about life in general, and about where they had been and what they had done— and things they had seen on television and y—instead of the facts in the text. And several spoke in Norwegian. Yes, I noticed you were trying to get them to Mm I thought maybe help them a little. The point was to practice talking Was it? What about your goal? About knowing the factsy Oh! Yes, you have point there. If it’s to make them know abouty Yes, I guess they did learn about factsyBut not these facts, what’s in the text. And talking about movies in Norwegian was not a goal. They need to know the text. But of course, to practice talking isyI didn’t think ofy I think you’re being too negative, Stein. Most of the students did exactly what they were supposed to. And the class talk in the end was very good, you let them elaborate and talk of their own experiences, and you gave them some good stories too. I agree. That was a good element in your lesson. The students were all very active and on task. Letting them share experiences, and sharing yours. And the textbook was there in the background, sort of structuring their stories. What students learn is not always exactly

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the facts they find in books. But why do you think this element functioned especially well? This sequence shows that although the participants have shared the experience, they account for it in different ways, constituting the event collectively. While Stein is concerned that not everything proceeded according to the plan, he nevertheless seems confident and sure of himself (he laughs when he talks about the surprises). The exchange can be interpreted as serving a double purpose: constituting the mentoring session as a place for being supportive rather than critical, and promoting the observed and experienced event as ‘‘successful’’. Siri generally applauds Stein’s activities in the classroom. She points to his efficiency, skills in classroom management (students did what they were told) and his good relations with the students (the sharing of experiences). These are potent descriptions of what counts as ‘‘good teaching’’. The fact that the mentor agrees and extends the description by making the connection to the textbook material (another element of ‘‘good teaching’’) further boosts the impression of Stein as pertinent and accountable. In the turns starting at (34) the discourse revisits the issue of goals. From the common place of discussing an apparently successful experience, the production of justified accounts does not warrant explicit reference to didactic or curriculum theory, nor is success valued according to the teacher students’ intentions as stated in the planning document. Rather, it is their impression that this worked as a positive learning experience for the students in the class that allows them to construct a success story. As tools for assessing the experience, new goals emerge: that students practice talking (34, 36), that they are on task and active (37, 38) and that they share experiences (38). These are process goals, directed at how students might learn rather than prescribing an expected outcome. 6. Discussion The three excerpts above have been selected to demonstrate how an element in the teaching process is accounted for differently in a peer discussion among student teachers, in a mentoring session, and as a joint experience. While it is a trivial observation that talk varies across time and context, the purpose

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of this paper is to broaden our understanding of how such variation is produced. As a discursive enterprise, the progression of discourse is contingent upon the participants’ development of common places from which they build their accounts. This is illustrated in the excerpts above, in which the concept ‘‘goal’’ as one part of the lesson plan is given discrete meanings across the instances. The everyday concept of a goal as a statement of purpose when activities are planned prevails in the discussions between the students in excerpt one. The common place of filling in a form suffices to build a justified account. In the second excerpt, Tom opts in his second turn for an alternative common place from which to proceed in the discussion by calling attention to goals as assets for the teacher in planning and evaluation. In (18) Sindre makes a new proposal for a common place when he talks about goal setting in a principled manner. However, this is not accepted as a common place (although nobody disagrees). In (23) Tom introduces yet another common place, that of didactic elements as constituting a relation. However, the bid for establishing this as a new common place is not taken up by the students, nor is it followed up by Tom. The results from this study indicate that the mentoring discourses work along two lines: to jointly construct common places, that is, to establish versions of what the participants are doing, and to respond to such versions by building justified accounts (cf. Middleton, 1998). Negotiations of common places serve the purpose of establishing partial intersubjectivity, building on reciprocal adjustments of perspective in which ‘‘states of affairs are brought into joint focus of attention, made sense of, and talked about from a position temporarily adopted by both participants in the communication’’(Rommetveit, 1992). Common places are justified, or argued for, drawing on the particular concerns related to the activity, privileging certain ways of talking and types of knowing (cf. Wertsch, 1991). A common feature of the discourse of student teachers and mentors in this study, as illustrated in the selected excerpt, is that established common places are short lived; the work of opting for and negotiating new common places is a relentless activity, rendering the discourses discontinuous and fluctuating. The need to repeatedly re-establish common places reflects internship as a border activity, directed by multiple motives. From the perspective of teacher education, the student teachers are

learners, but in the context of the school they are positioned as teachers, expected to perform the actions and operations necessary to enhance students’ learning (cf. Edwards et al., 2002, Edwards & Protheroe, 2004). As those authors show, mentors help the students to verbalise their experiences, give them feedback on their teaching activities, and help them understand what needs to be improved in their performance in the short and long run. In her study of Norwegian teacher education, Sundli (2001) likewise found that the discussions between mentors and student teachers predominantly were directed toward the doings of the student teachers, and that they were rarely explicitly theoretically informed. Results based on the analysis of mentors’ and teacher students’ talk in the study reported here show similar tendencies, such as in excerpt two above, in which principled issues are brought into the discussion by a student (18) and by the mentor (23). In the framework adopted in this study, such propositions are seen as bids in the joint construction of common places from which to proceed in the discussion. The critical point is if and how such bids are incorporated into the subsequent production of justified accounts (cf. Middleton, 1998). For student teachers as learners, legitimate accounts might be theoretically informed and inquiry oriented, while for the student teachers as teachers, what counts may be efficiency and effectiveness in instruction. In the discussions between mentors and student teachers, the mentors typically will ask questions and guide the students towards ‘‘valid’’ accounts. Empirical studies of internship in elementary schools (Sundli, 2001) and upper secondary schools (Mathisen, 2000) in Norway have shown that the theories of Handal and Lauva˚s (1987) have made a profound impact on supervision and counselling (cf. Franke & Dahlgren, 1996). In adopting this manner of guidance, the mentors typically steer clear of giving answers, concrete advice or telling students what to do; rather they use questions as a way of scaffolding the students in their efforts to build warranted accounts. A central tenet in Handal and Lauva˚s’ theory is that supervision should help students become aware conduct or performance, but also the grounds for acting or thinking in certain ways, and implicit educational theories and values. In the present study the reflections prompted by mentors’ questions most often focus on performance. Thus, the resources brought into play in the interactions could be seen as mostly practical and pragmatic, serving the purpose of scaffolding the

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students’ accounts in ways that render them efficient practitioners. However, the student teachers’ and mentors’ accounts are not exclusively building on practical experiences and spontaneous concepts. Teachers’ knowing is the situated and negotiated constitution of diverse conceptual, practical, and contextual resources, the critical issue is not whether theoretical knowledge or practical experience is explicitly applied, but how forms of knowing interact in student teachers and mentors’ meaning making. Forms of knowing constitute the resources in the discursive production of common places and accounts. This means that resources are not applied to practical situations, but re-contextualised and negotiated in the current practice. The analysis of micro-processes, in which student teachers and mentors collectively establish common places from which justified accounts are made, reveal the kinds of resources that are brought into play and the functions they might serve. 7. Conclusion The discursive development of accounts in boundary activities is complex, calling for transformation, combination, and coordination of conceptual, experiential and contextual resources that are developed in other practices. Also, in teacher education, students engage in activities as students in the university, and as teachers (however, peripheral) in schools. What drives each of these activities differs; students’ activities are motivated by learning, whereas the classroom activities of teachers-tobe are motivated by the performance of teaching. Mentoring discourses constitute emergent practices in which the tensions between the two motives are discursively managed by the participants’ use of conceptual and contextual resources. In this study, such tensions were managed by recurrent negotiations of common places, that is, creating foundations from which to proceed, a sense of ‘‘what we are doing’’. It was argued above that the constructed common places were vagarious, and that issues were often talked about from a practical perspective (cf. Edwards, 2003; Franke & Dahlgren, 1996), supporting the students’ learning to perform. An argument was also made for the importance of connecting spontaneous and scientific concepts in order to develop learners’ understanding (Vygotsky, 1986). The collected data suggest that such connections are rarely made explicit. What seems to be at

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stake are the claims and obligations they place on themselves as students, learners or teachers on the one hand, and the rights and duties placed on them by the community on the other (Shotter, 1984, p. 153). Over the span of the internship, students learn what counts, what to focus on, how to argue, and which resources to make use of to render themselves accountable in the current activity. In line with the arguments presented in this paper, educational theory is pertinent to the practice of teaching and learning to teach only to the extent that it is justified by practitioners in their accounting practices. The supremacy of the Vygotskian notions of psychological tools and scientific concepts (Vygotsky, 1986) lies in his argument that they are collectively developed tools for communication and thinking, tools that i.e. teachers may use individually and collaboratively to develop knowledge and expand understanding about their everyday activities (cf. Sa¨ljo¨, 2002). The results of this study indicate that what student teachers learn in internship cannot be identified as being theoretical or practical; rather, particular combinations of knowing emerge in student teachers’ and mentors’ accounting practices. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Department of Teacher Education and School Development at the University of Oslo for financial support of this project. This research is also supported by the strategic research effort ‘‘Competence and Media Convergence (CMC)’’ at the University of Oslo. For additional information about CMC, see http:// cmc.uio.no/. In addition, I want to thank the reviewers for critical and constructive comments, and colleagues at the Department of Teacher Education and School Development and Sten Ludvigsen at Intermedia, the Unisversity of Oslo, for challenges, advice and support.

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